Best practices for ending/concluding courses?

[debit]

We are a 4-year university implementing Canvas for fall. I am very confused about the different options for ending/concluding courses after the term ends and what they mean for student/instructor access. Our situation is also complicated by the fact that we have a lenient grade extension policy and students can generally take several weeks up to a year to complete work if they were given an incomplete grade -- they would still need access to submit missing assignments and instructors would need to be able to grade them. 

I am wondering what best practices are regarding ending/concluding courses. We will be operating with automated SIS imports.

-- Should we send "completed" for enrollments? What would that mean for student/instructor/ta access?

-- Should we set term end dates for students/instructors/tas? What would that mean for student/instructor/ta access and the ability to view or export content? If we set term end dates, what does that mean for courses with incompletes -- how should those be handled?

-- Should we send "completed" for courses (hard conclude)? What would that mean for student/instructor/ta access and the ability to view or export content?

[rislis]

Also looking for this answer. We have used Canvas for 4 years and have archived an entire term of courses, but teachers still see them as they scroll through to copy content, for example. I know how to conclude a course - how do we do a batch process to conclude an entire term of courses?

[rislis]

Always sad when there are no answers to important questions.

Any thoughts? 

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

I think the answers to the questions posed here are going to be some sort of "it depends" based on a lot of factors...

• Are you creating new course shells each term?
• What kind of access do you want students and teachers to have at the "end" of the course?
• Are you trying to automate everything (including incompletes), or do you have staff available to do some manual things?

I'm sure there are some additional questions that could come in play too...

We choose generally to use the term dates to control access to courses.  This works pretty well and requires minimal effort to set access for all courses in the term (compared to the effort involved in concluding individual enrollments).  For incompletes, we do have admins create sections that override the term availability dates for the specific student and instructor involved.

Concluded courses, no matter how the conclusion is done, will still manifest in areas like course imports, since in most cases, instructors are importing from a past course into a new one for the next semester.  I don't think there's any way to get around that without deleting enrollments completely (which would cause all kinds of other issues).\

Does this help out at all?

-Chris

[rislis]

Thanks, @chriscas . That does help and affirms what I thought the answer would be. I appreciate you taking the time to give your perspective.

[dschuma]

At BGSU, we too rely on term dates to control access.  Our default student access restriction will remove access at the term end date.    Teacher access becomes read-only at the term end date.  We actively discourage concluding course sites as the enrollments appear lost during normal use. We create new sites each term.  Makes the Courses page a bit messy for faculty, but we've not received significant complaints.

We use inactive enrollment status for students who drop the course so the enrollments do not disappear from the faculty.  Our first full Canvas term was Fall 2013 and we've used these strategies consistently since that time.